What’s Eating Gilbert Grape

Even if you have a taste for movies about dysfunctional families, as I do, you may be a little put off by the Grapes in this adaptation by Peter Hedges of his own novel: missing father, 500-pound mother, mentally disabled son (especially good work by Leonardo DiCaprio), and two daughters, as well as Johnny Depp to more or less hold things together. This is directed by Lasse Hallstrom (My Life as a Dog, Once Around), and his feeling for the look and mood of a godforsaken midwestern town is often as acute as Sven Nykvist’s cinematography; Juliette Lewis plays the out-of-town girl Depp takes a shine to once he starts getting tired of the married woman (Mary Steenburgen) he’s involved with, and while the picture is too absentminded to explain what it is that makes Lewis move in and out of town, she and Depp make a swell couple. There are other rough edges as far as plot is concerned, but I liked it. With Darlene Cates, Laura Harrington, Mary Kate Schellhardt, Kevin Tighe, and Crispin Glover. Old Orchard, Webster Place, Ford City, Bricktown Square, Lincoln Village, Water Tower. Read more

Chicago’s Own

A program of recent works by two local video artists. The longest is Pure (1993), an extremely ambitious and highly provocative globehopping video essay by the University of Chicago’s Scott Rankin–a densely packed discussion of exoticism, authenticity, and a great deal more. Mocking the role of the in-person TV commentator while offering nonstop philosophical notations about our dubious and ideologically informed grasp of the world we live in, Rankin may give us more material than we can comfortably digest in an hour–but then so do the world and the media he describes. On the same program are four videos by Northwestern University’s Annette Barbier; the only one I’ve seen, The Kitchen Goddess (1992), has some interesting computer graphics and ideas about domestic work. The others: Domestic Portraits 1 and 2 and Moving to the Suburbs, both made in 1993. Chicago Filmmakers, 1543 W. Division, Friday, March 4, 8:00, 384-5533. Read more